Social bookmarking is an off-page SEO activity that has been used to generate backlinks for websites from the early days of SEO. Submission of webpage links to various link sharing services such as Reddit, Tumblr, Scoop.it, Plurk, pearltrees, and so on is known as social bookmarking.
How Social Bookmarking Websites Work?
Social bookmarking sites work in a variety of ways. To improve traffic, a website can use any of the ways under the social bookmarking umbrella, such as off-page SEO techniques like storing pages offline and so on. The following are a few examples of how social bookmarking websites work:
ALSO READ: Top Social Bookmarking Sites List
1. Curating Content
Websites can develop complicated dashboards or sections that include numerous resources. This aids social bookmarking websites in storing and growing content or resources in order to appeal to a larger audience.
2. Organizing and Saving Content
A social bookmarking website’s sole objective is to give users with easy access to content or resources. As a result, many websites are particularly good at organising their resources and material so that consumers can find them quickly.
3. Labelling or Tagging Content
Many social bookmarking services develop custom tags and/or labels to make it easier for their users to find resources.
How Effective is Social Bookmarking for SEO?
An SEO agency aims to optimise a variety of elements, from On-Page to Technical factors, as well as establishing links for the web page utilising various Off-Page Techniques. Because this link submission activity is done at scale, it became necessary to see if the social bookmarking link building activity aids in obtaining results. As a result, we decided to conduct an experiment to see how effective this practise is.
Also Read: Top Off-Page SEO Submission Sites Lists for Best Ranking
Details of the Social Bookmarking Experiment
- Duration of the activity – 2 months
- Test URLs – 5
- Number of keywords tracked corresponding to these URLs – 16
- Number of links built: 50 Links in a week (10 for each URL). By the end of 2 months, we had built 400 links.
- Link Submission website: Bookmarking websites with DA>50
- Domain – Finance
Note: On these pages, we made sure there were no technical or on-page changes, as well as no off-page actions other than social bookmarking.
KPIs for this experiment
The following are the major KPIs that we choose to track for this case study.
- These pages have a high page authority.
- The 16 keywords that are linked with each other are ranked.
Outcome of Social Bookmarking Experiment
After completing this operation, we noticed that the Page Authority of these pages remained same for each of these URLs. There was no change in this metric as well.
We saw regular variations in the rankings for 16 of the keywords. At the end of the trial, there were 8 keywords whose rankings had improved, 3 keywords whose rankings had remained unchanged, and 5 keywords whose rankings had decreased. The weekly ranking data for these keywords is shown below.
Despite the fact that the page authority of the webpages did not rise, we can observe that this activity has had an impact on the ranking of these keywords or that it does have an impact on the rankings for a finance domain.
However, we recommend that you do a similar activity for your domain and then decide whether you should keep doing social bookmarking and incorporate it in your off-page activities depending on the results. Furthermore, if you are outsourcing digital marketing services such as link building or SEO, we propose that you investigate whether social bookmarking as a link building activity has an impact on your domain, as it is one of the most popular actions performed by an SEO agency.
10 Most Popular Social Bookmarking Websites
1. Twitter
Twitter is one of the world’s largest social media platforms, as well as the largest social bookmarking platform. Everything you publish is instantly kept in your account, making it an ideal bookmarking tool. Furthermore, because all retweets and likes are accessible through the “activity history” option, they can be deemed bookmarked.
2. Pinterest
Pinterest is the quintessential example of how social bookmarking techniques may be put to good use. This website not only allows users to organise their information or resources on intricate boards, but it also allows them to compare them to other, similar resources. For example, more than half of Pinterest users use the site to compare their shopping options before making a purchase, in order to locate the most accessible or cost-effective solutions!
3. Mix
This is an open, free website that allows users to save information for later viewing. Users are asked which domains they are interested in when they sign up, such as travel, cosmetics, fashion, food, popular culture, and so on. The website then provides sources to look out or follow on the users’ timeline. Furthermore, it is a fantastic website for interacting with your coworkers and exchanging various pieces of information while also receiving more recommendations for comparable stuff!
4. Pocket
Pocket is a social bookmarking site that takes things to the next level. You can not only store content from any resource on the Internet, but you can also utilise tools to annotate, highlight, and add comments to any or all of the stuff you’re reading on this website. You may also share this information with your colleagues and friends, along with your edits.
5. Slack
Slack is a multi-purpose website that offers a wide range of benefits. It can be used to communicate with your teammates, to visit many various websites in order to collect new pieces of content, and to share and save content individually or with your teammates by building your own channels.
6. Reddit
Reddit, dubbed the “first page of the Internet,” is one of the most popular social bookmarking services. It’s a site where anyone may share photographs, videos, links to content, and more, as well as interact with a community of users who can upvote or downvote their submissions. This allows users to save content that they enjoy and may wish to revisit in the future.
7. Slashdot
This social bookmarking site looks a lot like Reddit. Slashdot was created with the intention of being a social news site. It includes news stories and snippets from a variety of industries, as well as detailed content that users can access and share. Users can interact with these posts, save them to their cloud, and in some cases, even download them.
8. Folkd
Folkd is a social community website with the simple goal of allowing users to share, store, and reference content from anywhere on the Internet. Users can connect with and follow one another, as well as view what their connections have bookmarked. It’s a great way for coworkers to share information when they’re working on a project together.
9. We Heart It
We Heart It is a social bookmarking service designed exclusively for saving images, movies, and GIFs. It functions as a social networking site, allowing users to communicate with one another and exchange any of the aforementioned media. They can add it to their bookmarks and save it for later.
10. Scoop.it
Professionals, corporations, and non-profits are the target market for this website. Scoop.it serves to these industries by providing businesses with free and paid subscriptions that allow them to publish directly on their websites, blogs, articles, newsletters, and social media using Scoop.it.